Because You Have To

A Writing Life

Joan Frank

• Éditeur: University of Notre Dame Press
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780268079765
• Sujet: Littérature
• Sous-sujet: Dissertations littéraires

Part memoir, part handbook, part survey of the contemporary literary scene, Joan Frank's Because You Have To: A Writing Life is a collection of essays that, taken together, provide a walking tour of the writing life. Frank's aim is to form a coherent vision, one that may provide some communion about realities of the writer's vocation that have struck her as rarely revealed.

Frank offers what she has learned as a writer not only to other writers, but to those to whom good writing matters. Her insights about "thinking on paper" are never dogmatic or pontifical; rather, they are cordial and intellectually welcoming.

Original, witty, and practical, Frank ably steers us through the journey of her own life as a writer, as well as through the careers and work of other writers. Her subjects range widely, from the "boot camp" conditioning of marketing work to squaring off with rejection and envy; from sustaining belief in art's necessity to the baffling subjectivity of literary perception and the magical books that nourish writers. Frank's personal journey is wonderfully told, so that what in these essays is particular becomes useful and universal.

Striving

Spit and Band-Aids

The Business of Art

Recently mulling over the boxes and files of correspondence I’ve kept over the years, printed faxes or e-mails with my late best friend—a body of work that far outstrips that of any encyclopedia set or the Oxford English Dictionary or Joyce Carol Oates—I had a frisson of horror.

Those letters between us functioned as journals. Talking on paper or screen about reading and writing kept us alive—a secret oxygen tube enriching the thin air of day jobs and chores. We talked minimally of our own work, because we didn’t want to jinx it. Instead we talked of what we were reading, of inspiring quotes from other writers, their work, their techniques and choices. We traded literary gossip and family problems and sympathy and advice, and lamented the usual gross offenders: a mad national culture, costs of living, assaults to writing time.

From time to time I had supposed that, down the road, scanning those reams of letters would teach me something.

But as soon as I began leafing through them this time, I understood suddenly that I did not need to look at them anymore to know their gists.

I saw with dismay that though I call myself an artist, the nature of my busy reports to my friend—consuming much of the day’s best energy—were mainly those of a campaign strategist. I didn’t fill those letters with gropings for the essence of truth or beauty or art. Nor, to my shame, did I spend page after page wrestling problems of craft.

Instead, those pages were about logistics. Arrangements. Schemes, plans, finagling. Trains, boats, planes. Money, money, money. Awards and rewards. Methods. Machinations. The politics of sneaking things through, firing things out, getting attention. Illnesses and medicines. How much sleep had been received, how much more was longed for. Loans and repayment schedules. What I could get by on. What I had to have.

To borrow the words of an old pop song: “Wishin’, and hopin’, and thinkin’, and prayin’.”

To borrow Saul Bellow’s: “toil, tears, sweat and business-wriggling.”

My letters, my thoughts, were about striving.

How wretched. How creepy; how low. Here is the writer in actuality: frantically searching for loan forms, wondering whether to go into debt to hire a publicist, watching bylines and reviews (and online social networks) to see who’s doing what. Applying for residencies, grants, awards. Tearing her hair over money, agents, publishers, fellow writers, reviews, jobs, acceptances and rejections, page proofs, misalliances and misunderstandings. Getting sleep, getting time. Calculating, strategizing, kvetching.

Quotidian dreck. The spit and Band-Aids part of the writing life: yanking and knotting, bundling it together, trundling it along. The irresistible image is that of a one-man band, a different instrument attached to every limb as he marches. I would bet most writers feel caught, at some point, in some version of this. I would bet that very few are actually able to spend most of each day in a silent room at a peaceful desk with a single rose in the milk-glass vase, pen nub to creamy paper, sinking into the sacred dream. The rest of us belly-crawl along a ditch under bullet fire: tasks and errands, letters, forms, phone calls, faxes, e-mails, bulletins, favors. Responses, courtesies. Appointments. Queries, requests, proposals, counteroffers. Nudging. Application deadlines. Fund-raising. Readings. E-mail e-mail e-mail.

Have I mentioned earning a living yet? Have I mentioned family life?

And that’s before anything’s necessarily published. Once publication arrives there is publicity to seek, and if you get some, to manage it. Then, once you’re considered established (or so I am told), people want you to blurb their books, judge contests, write recommendations, teach guest classes, attend seminars and panels.

Let’s go back to the crawling part.

Bafflement occurs when we notice that we are nine-tenths given over to the busywork of writing, and one-tenth (if that) to writing itself. We had imagined that percentage to be reversed. We had imagined the job of writing to be contemplative. Interior. Sequestered.

Ah.

I’m confessing here that the greater part of my days is given over to the business end of writing, which to my mind means the mongering of it (as in fishmonger). Striving and conniving. And since I cannot change this, I wish I felt there was more merit in it.

There is only one merit: that of necessity. Simply, you do what you must to push the work into the world. A maniacal stage mother with her grumpy, sticky daughter.

Why? Because you long ago grasped that if you don’t push it, no one will.

I’ll repeat that for long-term storage: If you don’t, no one will. No writing police will bash down your door at 4 a.m. demanding to publish (or publicize) you. It would be nice if that happened, and to some select few in the history of the universe, it does. The rest of us do Sisyphus duty.

As gentle consolation, I want here to remind those who feel stuck in striving, of the quality of company they’re in. Read any great artist’s letters, journals, interviews. Irrespective of that artist’s brilliance, you will find familiar concerns. How to afford the next round of supplies. Whom to be jealous of. Whom to importune. Family dynamics. Appointments and rounds, needs and problems; speculation, longing, cadging and cajoling. Illness and enemies. Jealousy. Prospects. Funding. Self-pity. Pride, scorn, fear.

Trains, boats, planes.

Look at Mary McCarthy’s letters, or Katherine Mansfield’s. Chekhov’s, Louise Bogan’s, Thornton Wilder’s. William Maxwell’s to Frank O’Connor. I’m only tossing out names as they float past. Each shlepped through bewildering obstacles. Poverty, illness, peril. Rent, food, children, adultery, mental collapse, houses burning down. Getting the work seen and attended. Alcohol, drugs. Electroshock therapy. Bad romance, bad health, bad public relations.

Flannery O’Connor’s early letters describe her struggle to dissolve her obligation to a publishing company which had first legal option on her first novel-in-progress, Wise Blood. That publisher wanted her to revise the novel to make it more pleasant, and she turned away this notion with calm but incredulous contempt. She was running out of money, trying to finish the novel and then work with the draft. She was also trying to sell a few short stories at the same time, and her distress—her sheer bafflement at finding herself in this kind of distress—are drolly evident in these letters. She was feeling as most writers must: How did this happen? How did I come to be spending so much time flailing in this sucking muck?

One review written about a book of Saul Bellow’s letters speaks of Saul as being “deep in … ‘the profundity game,’ … constantly trying to balance the equation between rumination and action, solipsism and distraction, the temptations of selfhood and the noise of the real world.”

At age 73, Katherine Anne Porter told an interviewer, “I think I’ve only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.”

Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his beloved brother and sole supporter Theo bemoan the vagaries of the French postal system, worrying constantly about when Theo will send the next bit of money. With no funds, Vincent scarcely eats. He writes ardently of his work, of course. But right alongside that monumental quest, we find an obsessing that is more wrenching for its homely dailiness: Who might buy his work, and for how much. Windy weather makes dirt stick to the canvases when he paints outdoors. There is serious difficulty finding somewhere to live. A dismissive colleague berates his potential. Finding models is an ordeal, since he can pay almost nothing. Physical and mental breakdown, repulsed love, incalculable heartache. It is unbearably moving. Most of us, thank heaven, are not in such ghastly straits. But we can recognize, there as elsewhere, the unkillable insistence of the mundane.

One kinder truth about the routine business of writing is that it gives back a sense of guardianship and husbandry, the way farming or gardening can. When the fruits arrive, the gardener recalls the daily cost of coaxing them to life. Writing-related chores, even the most drudging, also generate a sense of continuity—evidence you’ve not deserted your own cause, even if you may not be producing every second.

That is my reasoning, anyway. It may not compel others. But it appears to me that task-tending threads us through the days, breaks the calendar into graspable increments, soothes as a jump-start and organizing principle. Even fire spotters must haul food and supplies, sweep the floor, and issue an occasional report.

Why do we bemoan the maintenance chores of a writing life? Here is how my late friend, Deborah, answered that: “I do think this spit and Band-Aids part of the writing life is not uncommon, even with successful writers. I read an interview with [Kazuo] Ishiguro wherein the interviewer was allotted fifteen minutes of interview time while Ishiguro was walking to another appointment, and you got such a sense of the nightmare of packed time and no time to walk, and Ishiguro apologetic and under the thumb of his editor who scheduled him.”

Much, she reminded me, depends on a writer’s attitude toward getting published. “I don’t know who gets to have a ‘true’ writing life except for the fabulously successful or for the hermit who doesn’t care about publication. I actually know a man who got a job as a park ranger in a remote part of the country and who went for ten years of his life without speaking to a soul except on a ham radio as part of his job and who wrote pages and pages of poetry which he never sent anywhere. And he said those were the very best ten years of his life. And I believe him.”

My friend also reminded me that successful writers tell interviewers they write every day from nine to five, sometimes evenings. The less famous declare they write every day before the kids wake up, on Sundays, during summer, or at art colonies. Her point, I think—and it seems to be something one must relearn repeatedly—was that you square off with it to get it done however you can. That’s what striving figures into: doing what you can within the life you choose—more accurately, the life that chooses you.

Here is Katherine Anne Porter: “I think probably the important thing is to get your work done [any] way you can—and we all have our different a...